Skepticism

EVENTS

The abuse thread

I am so bogged down in work…I’m clinging on to the faint hope of liberation as all my deadlines are past next Tuesday (and they will be met! They must!), but until then, I’m thoroughly tied up and sweating over a gazillion things that have to be finished right now. So blogging will be light for a bit.

Until I’ve leapt past the work essentials though, I’d like to keep you occupied, so I’m open for insults. Vent over my failures and laziness by calling me names in the thread below. Try to be creative; zoological insults are particularly appreciated, and please avoid trite scatology.

You sir, are a slug a bed, your slothful behavior regarding posting of today’s dose of doggerel has not gone unnoticed by the eagle-eyed readers of this blog. We will continue to hound you until you cease to flounder.

You know, Professor, you are all-right.
Thanks for all the great articles and information you send out to us.
Please take a few days and get things done that need to be done. Don’t worry about us we will be just fine:
We’ve got ENKIDUM and matt penfold to keep us entertained.
Thanks again.

I’ve been trying to reach you through e-mail, but my messages keep on being delayed and then rejected. Below, the body of my messages:

I received an e-mail announcing that the Department of Developmental Biology of Stanford University is hiring a new Associate Professor. I immediately thought of you (besides working in Stanford, the weather in California must be better than in Morris). The mail doesn’t say much more, just to contact Sue Elliott, Faculty Affairs Administrator (sue.elliott@stanford.edu), with your résumé, a description of your professional interests and three letters of recommendation with electronic signature, before October 15. The mail advises to check the department’s website (http://devbio.stanford.edu) for more information on the matter, but I couldn’t find any (I didn’t search very deeply) but the sender of the e-mail is a trustworthy source, so I decided to e-mail you about it. Perhaps something good might come out of it.

Best regards

José Arturo Enríquez (the taller guy you had breakfast and later went to the cathedral with in Mexico City)

You want an insult? Sir, you deserve to have your children convert to various fundamentalist religious sects, and embrace creationism and homeopathy. May the rest of your days be filled with maddening, estranged relationships to those who should be closest to you.

Boooo! Booo! Booooo! …That’s what you are… the king of garbage… the king of refuse… so bow down to him if you want… bow to him… bow to the king of slime, the king of filth, the king of putrescence.. BOOO! BOOOO! RUBBISH! FILTH! SLIME! MUCK! BOOO! BOOO! BOOOOOOOO!

Letting real-world duties take precedence? Sounds like such a friggin’ biologist. Gotta get your hands dirty or you’re not happy. No, if you were a *real* scientist like, say, a theoretical physicist, you would know that time and space are incomprehensible and deadlines are meaningless. You wouldn’t have to actually *grade* every single one of those tests or read those papers, just throw them on a probabilistic bell curve, ignore the outliers as statistically insignificant, and you’ll be well within an acceptable 2.7% margin of error. And then have plenty of time to, like, bathe. And then spend the rest of your day pondering whether string theory implies 10, 11, or 26 invisible dimensions. (Or more! Wouldn’t that be deep, man…)

@PZ Myers
So… coupling it with my “Mister Zed” insult… I guess that makes it “Emperor Zed”. “Kneel before Zed!” does have a nice ring to it IMHO. “Kneel before Zee!” sounds too much like you are having somebody kneel in front of a mirror.

wow, so much creativity. Here I am, exhausted after teaching students about coloumb’s law and looking forward to a lunch time intelligent discussion about Anything other than rudimentary math and some students difficulty with same, and I get this excuse!

If I wanted excuses for not getting the most important task done, I would talk to my freshmen about their homework.

You, sir, are an inveterate masticator, one who has, most likely, willingly perambulated small children while encouraging the child, and instructing the innocent soul, in proper mastication techniques. Further, I suspect that you have, buried in your past, episodes of thespian behaviour. And, may I add, you possess more imagination and scruples than even the most accomplished ferroequinologist!

@pelamun
I think that’s part of the joke… It’s just a litteral translation that doesn’t work in other languages. It doesn’t really work in French either.

Though, if you want to say poopyhead in a way that actually works grammatically in Japanese, you’d have “kusottare”. But then that’s just nasty and doesn’t work as a joke, since that’s pretty much the same as “shithead”. To me, “unchi no atama” sounds like something a 4 years old might say and that’s it.

‘E knows full well that this AiG yegg in Fleming Island, Fla, ‘as been mocking evolution with (among other things) a slide showing ‘is proprietary crocoduck and calling it a “gator-bird” – “[m]uch to the delight of children—of all ages” – and ‘e ‘asn’t uttered a peep, I tells ya. Not a peep!

I was going to attempt to imitate several of the eloquently descriptive comments, here, but then realized a much more effective fashion of abuse would be to suggest that your slacking was due to making mad love with Glenn Beck. :D

I fail to see the humour, if it doesn’t work in the target language. If you want bilingual jokes, there are better ones around.

unchi is indeed children’s language, but “unchi no atama” is in no way something a four year old would use, in my opinion, I gave the only context it might make sense above. What would work marginally better is “unchi-atama” though, you can find some hits where it is used as a jocular insult.

(I think the Japanese language is impoverished regarding swear words, though there are some, if you keep digging, there is quite a strong social taboo against using them, especially the m-word).

@pelamun
Ultimately I was referring to PZ’s entry about a sketch with “pharyngula” written on it in katakana. He said that he suspected it might say “PZ is a poopyhead”, and then somebody immediatly went and made a “PZ wa unchi no atama”. I know that it makes about as much sense as “fetchez la vache!”, and that in reality “unchi no atama” only really makes sense in the context of “the head of the poop” referring to the visible part of the poop when not all of it can be seen.

I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now, and the feeling I got interacting with Japanese is that swear words that are not targetted are not quite as bad as in English (ie: “fuck!” alone when something bad happens), but that targetted swear works (ie: “fuck you!”) are seen as far worse than in English.

I was going to attempt to imitate several of the eloquently descriptive comments, here, but then realized a much more effective fashion of abuse would be to suggest that your slacking was due to making mad love with Glenn Beck. :D

Oh come on! Did you have to pick Glenn Beck? Nobody deserves Glenn Beck*. How the hell am I going to get that image out of my head?

You make me sick with all your bloody excuses. Your purpose in life is to keep us amused throughout the day. Do you realise that if people here can’t check for updates five times a day they might do anything!!!!! Downloading child-porn or looking at jihadi websites and deciding the whole holy warrior thing sounds pretty cool. But you don’t give a toss do you, with your so-called ‘work’.

May God bless you, and the light of the son fill your soul keeping your thoughts pure and your body chaste until the day he comes to take you to his bosom and rise to the father’s mansions where you will sing hymns in happy idyle forever, never again troubled by that which you did not know, secure in the faith that God all the answers to the questions that troubled your earlier life.

(You asked for it. Me, I think I need to go wash scour my brain with a steel brush and hydrochloric acid after thinking that up).

PZ Myers, you lazy friend-to-the-bears. Rather frolic with them in the woods, would you, than do honest and hard work? No, worse yet! Even over meat and cakes would you place the enthusiasms of the kings of the forest; even over manly mind and mantle would you place the dancings of the gods of the wood.

Fie! Lazy I call you, feckless as the waves of the dead lake, useless as firs on the dead mountain; a lazy person I call you, with no preamble or prevarication or repetition; as a spell and a shout I name you: the One-who-gets-no-thing-done, the maid with rot in her churn, the lad with a broken spear; the sleeping god of the sleepers that sleepeth, and work not, I call you.

You were not by the star-eyed bears seduced, but willingly went to dance with them; you were not by the pearl-teethed bears enticed, but gladly came to prance in their company; in the glades and the shades, neath fir and foxwood and pine you slouched in the slow, and kicked in the high, in the be-ringed, be-damned shambling dance of the forest; for when there was work to be done, you went and danced with the bears.

Fain would you sing,

Rose the live beer upward, upward,
From the bottom of the vessels,
Upward in the tubs of birch-wood,
Foaming higher, higher, higher,
Till it touched the oaken handles,
Overflowing all the caldrons;
To the ground it foamed and sparkled,
Sank away in sand and gravel,

fain would you dance; yet while the dancing and the drinking of the bear-party proceedeth, the work of man and woman’s toil all lie undone, and the bears grow hungry.

Fain would you sing, fain would you dance, with the lords of the forest, with the star-eyed space-kin of man, with the bear, hairy and snouty and not-to-be-trusted; but your work is undone, and the bears unfed; dance away, dance away, for see they dance not with you for any liking they have for the surface or soul of you.

The redness of you they desire, the blood of you, the meat of you; for the hunger of the bear is the end of the man, and when the dance is done there is one dancer less, and the bears lie down fed.

Flee! Flee! Run to your work, to your toil, to your papery hill and stream of bits; for it is spoken in the forests of Finland and the speaking is true: the wages of the lazy are to be eaten alive by bears, and those wages, PZ Myers, those wages are yours.

(There, that should do for an insult in the pseudo-ancestral fashion. Stop procrastinating or the bears of the wood will eat you!)

I recently read someone using the term ‘twat fucker’ apparently as an insult.

Depending on how one makes the statistical adjustments for male and female homosexuals and bisexuals (etc) isn’t the total number of ‘twat fuckers’ in a given population somewhere around/ over the 50% mark?

So, yeah! PZ, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish an Oxford comma from standard Guardian practice, you twat fucker!

Why would I want to insult you PZ? You with that face of a weird beaver/otter lovechild, that body so reminiscent of a giant squid washed up on the shore, your little mole eyes and hyena hairdo, why would anyone possibly want to give you any abuse?

PZ, I can’t believe what an arrogant narcissist you are! I wouldn’t participate in your stupid “oh roast me like I’m David Hasselhoff” contest if you were the last stupid beardo atheist on the planet. The nerve of someone from some head-in-the-clouds ivory-tower elitist perfesser from a college which has some loudmouth gasbag blogger as it’s only claim to fame, to expect “the internet” to even bother spending one moment of time contemplating your terrible sense of dress and some kind of weird octopus fetish and going to the effort of posting the 3563rd comment of your self-indulgent, waste-of-time blog just praying that, oh gosh golly, I hope PZ reads my comment, as if we have nothing better to do, only proves what a big headed fool you are. I wouldn’t spare a single pixel on insulting you, you aren’t worth the effort.

You Three-toothed puffer!
You Hog sucker!
You Slimy sculpin!
You Convict cichlid!
You Greenbone!
You Worm eel!
You Shortnose sucker!
You Tube-snout!
You Wahoo!
You Steelhead!
You Pollock!
You Weasel shark!
You Longjaw mudsucker
You Clown loach!
You Snubnose parasitic eel!

You are one tentacle short of an octopus.
Ken Ham is a better speaker than you.
Icanhascheezburger is a better read than Pharyngula.
Your beard will never match Darwin’s for coolness.
Even your town is named after a cat.
I LOL at you.